Year 6 have a cracking time at Bletchley Park

11.11.2025

Learn about our nation’s past?  Be inspired by war-time heroes?  Crack codes to trap a traitor?  Our Year 6 girls did all these and more on their trip to Bletchley Park just before half-term. They certainly had their analytical skills put to the test during our codes and ciphers workshop, as the workshop-leader played extremely fast-paced Morse code messages for us to decipher. Year 6 are a quick-thinking and curious bunch, and our workshop-leader was impressed by how efficiently they were able to crack a series of different codes using Caesar Shift wheels, PigPen ciphers and more.  Harriet, in 6G, was astonished by the power of the real Enigma machine we saw, recalling that ‘there were almost 159 quintillion possible settings for the machine…I was really fascinated and wanted to know more.’

A tour of Bletchley followed, in which dressing up and role-play as new recruits played a large part. The girls were intrigued to know that over three-quarters of the workforce of Bletchley were women. Poppy B, in 6B, shared her own connection with one of Bletchley’s war-time female analysts. Touring the cramped, dark huts in which code-breakers would have worked really brought home to the girls what conditions might have been like during the war.

Of course, an inevitable highlight of any school outing is a trip to the shop; we were so pleased to see how many of the girls were inspired to buy puzzles and code books at the Bletchley gift shop. We hope that the trip has whetted Year 6’s appetite for problem-solving and be a reminder of what we can achieve when we work together.